Many data applications involve communications of a plurality of data streams. Audio and video conferencing, by way of example, may involve communication of audio data streams, video data streams, and other data streams. Within this exemplary application, some conferences simultaneously link many locations for communication of data such as video, audio, digital files, and the like. Each location may be communicating data streams from multiple cameras, microphones, and other sources. Under such circumstances, the bandwidth required for each individual location can be quite large. This large amount of required bandwidth can be costly, and may be unavailable for some conference attendees, thereby limiting their ability to participate.
One proposed solution is compression of signals. Even when using compressed signals, however, required bandwidth can be quite large. Also, compression may be accompanied by a loss of quality. Another proposed solution to this problem has been to send data streams from only one conference attendee to sites that are operating using limited bandwidth. By way of particular example, one proposed method in the case of video conferencing using Real-time Protocol (RTP) data streams is the use of source specific multicast (SSM). This proposed solution leaves many problems unresolved, however. For example, SSM only allows for selection of data streams based on IP address, and is therefore not effective in the case where a single IP address is generating multiple streams since all of the streams with that address will be sent. Also, SSM can be complicated and costly to implement, with the result that it is not widely supported.
Unresolved problems in the art therefore remain.